An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief

Intent-based networking is the latest buzzword to sweep across IT — and its promise is profound. As the technology stack becomes necessarily more complex, two things happen: it becomes almost impossible to architect the network to anticipate every potential unintended consequence, and mistakes become more likely and more impactful.

Intent-based networking (along with SD-WAN, NFV and other recent developments) all aim, in part, to help solve this problem. But how do you know if your network is realizing your intent? And how do you ensure that this intent is maintained as the network changes and grows continuously more complex?

Veriflow has introduced a new technology that it believes can answer these questions and help enterprise organizations eliminate outages and vulnerabilities in their network — mathematically. They do this by applying what is called formal verification to networks, which uses an algorithm to “predict all possible network-wide behavior and mathematically verify availability and security, instead of waiting for users to experience outages or vulnerabilities to be exploited.”

The company thinks that enterprise networks are, in fact, complex systems that look and act a lot like complex enterprise applications. As such, it believes organizations should apply the same principles of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) to the network. This belief is why it calls its approach continuous network verification. It’s an intriguing new concept that may be coming just in time to help organizations tame the network complexity that will not be going away anytime soon.